Ninth City Burning (3 page)

“Hey, Jaxten,” Kizabel says, coming over to me. “It's OK.”

I'm afraid I'll start crying, which in front of these three would be even worse than throwing up.

“We're all scared,” Kizabel is saying. “That's why we're up here.”

“Definitely,” Imway agrees.

“I don't get it,” I say, shaking my head. Is it that, with me as Champion, they're so sure they're going to die that they might as well not bother with the shelters—save Romeo the trouble, like Bomar said?

“If the city is hit, it won't matter whether we're in the shelters or not,” Vinneas says.

“What do you mean?” I look up at him, confused, but all he does is calmly finish his drink.

“Vinn.” There's a warning in Kizabel's voice.

“He's been told he has to protect the city, Kiz. He should at least know what he's defending.” He looks at me. “What do you think, Jax? Can I call you Jax?”

I'm not sure how to answer, but I say, “OK.”

“Excellent,” he says, setting down his cup. “So here's the thing, Jax. Those shelters were built a long time ago, before we knew quite what kind of firepower Romeo had at his disposal. As it turns out, nothing we can build would be strong enough to survive what he's throwing at us. Down there, up here, we're all cooked either way. Except for you, of course,” he adds with a grin. “You're about the most indestructible thing this side of a black hole.”

“But if that's true, why—”

“Why stick you in the Forum, when you could be off with the rest of the defense force?” he says. “To keep the city running, mostly, and the City Guns firing. After you, those guns are our best chance of coming out of this with all our atoms still attached. And I suppose it doesn't hurt to let people imagine they're safe. The prospect of imminent certain death can have a soggying effect on morale.”

For some reason, hearing this makes me feel better. I don't know why. I mean, it's awful if all those people think they're safe when they're not. But if they do die, at least it won't be because I did something wrong. “But how do you know?” I ask. “About the shelters, I mean.”

“One of the drawbacks to being good with numbers,” Vinneas says.

“One of the drawbacks to having friends who are good with numbers,” Imway adds, giving Kiz a light shove that still almost knocks her over.

“We're not the only ones, of course,” Kizabel says, after shoving Imway back, then kicking him in the shins. “All the city officials know, more or less.”

“And now you.” Vinneas leans over the railing. “The three of us figure no one needs us at the shelters, and anyway, we all work in different parts of the city, so it's pretty unlikely we'd end up in the same place during an attack. We decided we'd rather be together.”

“And since there's no one around,” Imway says, refilling his and Vinneas's cups, “we thought we'd make a little party of it.”

“The view from here definitely beats the shelters, too,” Kizabel adds. “Those places creep me out.”

“What my friend here means to say is that in confined spaces, people are more likely to notice you're drunk,” Imway clarifies.

“I am not
drunk
!” Kizabel snarls, punching him with each word.

“Beats the Seat of the Champion, too,” I say, because it's true.

“I can't believe they make you just sit there by yourself and wait.” Kizabel sounds really disgusted at the idea.

“It's tradition. It's in the Handbook.”

“Oh, right, the
Handbook
. The sum of all the world's truth and knowledge.”

“Sure is.” Imway laughs, raising his cup so he and Vinneas can toast.

Kizabel ignores them. “Let's make this the new tradition. Anytime that siren goes off, you meet us here. We'll even bring something for you that isn't a Category Four Restricted Substance.”

“I always said Kiz comes up without our best ideas,” Vinneas says. “What about it, Jax?”

“OK,” I say. “It's a deal.” And it's strange, but for the first time since the attack began, I feel like I really could fight.

Eventually, Kizabel convinces Imway to return her cup. They offer me a drink, too, but I don't take it—I've never had aquavee before, and I'm not sure what it'll do to me. If I do have to meet Romeo today, I want to make him pay. For a while we're all quiet, looking out over Ninth City, weirdly peaceful in the gray light. It's always pretty impressive, especially when you're way up in the Forum, with the tall stone buildings spreading out below, but I'd never really thought of it as beautiful until now. The air is warm but clear, washed clean from the rain, with little wisps of mist floating past, and with the whole city silent like this, I can almost imagine I'm high in the mountains somewhere, far away from everything.

And then the City Guns begin to move. The ground shakes as all around they turn and point their massive barrels into the sky.

Vinneas has taken a small watch from his pocket. He glances at the numbers, then up at the clouds. “Here we go,” he says.

“Something else we've figured out, Jax,” Imway says. “If Romeo doesn't get us within twenty minutes of the incursion, he won't get us at all.”

All across Ninth City, the guns begin to fire, each one burning with a blinding flash, slashing upward with pillars of light that leave wide holes in the clouds where they cut through, enough to see blue sky and shafts of sunlight.

Suddenly, Kizabel winds up and throws her cup into the air over the city. “Come and get us, Romeo, you asshole!” she screams. “What are you waiting for? We're right here!”

“Imway was right,” Vinneas says to me. “She's a complete lightweight.”

But Imway is shouting, too. “Yeah, let's go! What's wrong, Romeo—you scared?”

And before I know it, I'm shouting with them. “You just try it! I'll break your stupid face!” I decide if we make it out of this, I'll need to think of something better to yell next time.

“Show us what you've got!”

“Our boy Jax is gonna tear you a new one!”

We keep yelling, and the ground rumbles with each shot of the City Guns, faster and faster, like a gigantic drum, until they're coming so fast and so loud, we can't hear our own shouts.

Beside me, Vinneas is still watching the time.

W
e reach the crossing just as the clouds that have been trailing our caravan now for a day and a night finally overtake us, scattering the cold air with flakes as small and bright as stars. Whoops and shouts go up all along the line of wagons to greet the first snow of winter. I have heard it is otherwise among the mighty townships and the northern tribes, but for us Walkers, winter has always been the happiest season.

Mama sits beside me in the front of our wagon, quietly smoking her pipe while I keep Chester, our cart horse, to his duties. Baby Adam hides in back, his bravado of the past days having lasted only to the first sight of the high pass, whereupon he near about wet his britches. I have told him to get out and walk awhile so he can see just how wide and strong the ridge is, but he prefers to cover his head with blankets. Leon, our rat terrier, is whimpering to console him. I will admit the path feels much worse than it looks, rocking us this way and that and setting the pots and pans hanging in our wagon to clattering, and I am glad we are fifth in line through the ravine and not first.

“Come up and keep us company, cowboy,” Mama calls. “We're just about over the ridge.” This enticement is enough to lure my brother into the open, perhaps because Mama has not called him Baby Adam, a title he likes not at all but which has stuck to him well past his baby years. Baby is seven now and too fond of coddling. He still has the fine blond hair he was born wearing, firm evidence in my opinion that he remains in most respects an infant, and I plan on referring to him as such until he shows me wrong. He comes out carrying the fiddle he inherited from Papa, proof his courage is not fully restored. Torturing that poor instrument and the ears of anyone within hearing is a balm for Baby's soul, it seems, because
he plays only when he's anxious or afraid. Soon, Leon is beside him, singing along, and between the two of them and the pots still banging with each bump of the wagon, they set up a racket wanting only a chorus of devils to complete a full demonic symphony.

It is to this unmelodious anthem that the scouts return. They appear at the edge of the ravine, horses and riders breathing clouds into the freezing air, the rock walls sparkling with crystalline frost, and a moment later, we hear the bugle sounding through the mountains, signaling that they have encountered no danger, that the way ahead is clear. Once again, the caravan sets up a cheer. Even Chester senses the excitement, and it is all I can do to keep him from charging ahead. The snow is still sparse, but I know there is ice lurking beneath the thin white lace laid over the ground.

The scouts are waiting for us as we round the pass. The ridge widens and levels, and with a tumble into the ravine not so likely, Baby and Leon leave off their caterwauling, the last of their wails fading as my sister, Rae, trots up on Envy, her piebald mare.

“I hope you've got another song in you, Baby,” Rae says, smiling at him with her warm, suede-brown eyes. “I told the scouts you would play us into New Absalom.”

Baby mutely shakes his head and holds out his arms, asking to be picked up and forgetting all about the fiddle, which nearly bounces from the wagon at the next bump.

“Damn it, Baby!” I shout, grabbing for the fiddle. “You break this thing, and I'll have your guts for garters!” I have watched my sister unman our coda's meanest rowdies with the same words and less, but my little brother appears hardly to have heard.

Rae meanwhile has lifted Baby onto the saddle in front of her and placed her hat on his head. Only with Rae does Adam truly earn his title, nor will she quit spoiling him no matter how much I get after her for it.

“Mm sorry,” says Baby Adam, plainly not sorry.

“How about you, Sunshine?” Rae asks. Rae is about the only one who still uses this name for me. I nearly reply that my name is Naomi or hers is Puddinghead, but unlike Baby Adam, I have the sense not to get upset when someone calls me something I don't like.

“How about me what?” I ask, sharper than I intend. The pair of us have been bickering the better part of a month, and I was prepared for some chiding or rebuke. But my sister is not the sort to come at you sideways. If
she means to start a fight, she will lay in right away, and just now she seems as merry as you please.

Rae shakes the snow from her matted braids, hair the brown-gold of burned sugar. Her tanned face is flushed from the cold, her scarf stiff with frozen breath. She is nineteen and beautiful, even by the standards of the townships, where girls are rumored to bathe almost daily and can generally be counted upon to have all their teeth. “How about you play for us? I promised the scouts we'd have a tune. You're too kind a girl to make your big sister a liar.”

Rae is highly peculiar when it comes to my fiddling. She could easily play for herself, and yet hardly a day goes by in which she does not try to cajole a song out of me, usually on some pretext, as lately I have wearied of acting her personal minstrel. I would offer some mean remark if I thought meanness would discourage her, but it is not possible to hurt Rae's feelings as far as I have seen, and anyway, it turns out today I do feel like playing, even like the fiddle wants me to play; I could almost swear I hear it humming to me on its own. So I tell Rae sure and hand Mama Chester's reins and set the old fiddle to my arm.

The tune I have in mind is slow and somewhat mournful but also happy, what Papa called a waltz. It is an old song well-known among our coda, and only a few notes have passed before people begin to sing, first in the wagons closest to us—Jasper Hollis and his family just ahead, and the Silva girls with their husbands and Alicia Silva's new baby boy—and then others up and down the line, until all fifteen wagons are mooning and crooning along with my fiddle, and it is thus that we come finally to New Absalom and our winter rest.

For the past three seasons, my coda has traveled all up and down the continent trading and foraging and tending our small herds, and never have we remained in one place more than a few nights running. To stop longer would be to hazard attack from the tribes that claim those lands as their territory, most of whom are hostile to anyone not their own and consider caravans like ours fat and tempting plunder. Even on the move, we are often called upon to defend ourselves, but we are as a rule better armed than most tribesmen and unwilling to surrender our wagons without demanding payment up front in blood, and once our assailants realize this, we are generally deemed not worth the trouble. But in the wintertime, most everything north of the bridgelands is covered in snows so
savage that attempting a trek of any distance is to invite death into your own boots, and even the fiercest warriors will not venture far from their lodges. So when the cold comes, we Walkers take the provisions we have spent the year gathering to some snowbound roost and wait out the cold months in safety.

New Absalom is the finest of our winter refuges, though at first sight it looks like little more than an overgrown ruin. The sprawling shrubbery and tall grass is a careful deception, however, planted deliberately to make it seem as if New Absalom's last inhabitants left long ago and with no intention of returning. Once the brush and dirt are cleared away, we will have a town of grand stone homes seemingly untouched by time.

This place is what my people call a shroomtown, owing to the way everything from buildings to roads to walls to stairways seems to have sprouted like so many mushrooms from the ground. We have encountered other such localities in our wanderings, but never one so intact or so secluded. Nor have we ever succeeded in puzzling out the means by which such structures were raised. Once, Randy Tinker Bose tried digging under the wall of a shroomhouse and discovered it was fused to the living rock beneath. His conclusion was that the builders of New Absalom were somehow able to command Nature herself to grow houses the way she might grow mountains or trees, though presumably a bit more quickly. Everyone agreed this was a damn-fool notion, but to date it remains our only explanation. What we do know is that shroomhouses are sturdy and comfortable, more so even than the houses they have in the townships, which are impressive to look at but still made with nails and planks and other common materials, much the same as our own wagons.

By tomorrow night, we will be fully settled in New Absalom, and there will be a feast and a bonfire to celebrate the start of winter, but tonight we are quiet and somber, settling together in the huge rock fortress we call Everett's Palace, a fanciful name that stuck as fanciful names often do. Despite its generous proportions, the Palace holds heat well, and a few small fires warm it nicely. I roll up in my blankets, planning to make a show of sleeping, though I expect the real article will be hard to come by.

Tomorrow will be my first ride with the scouts, who are charged with venturing ahead of the caravan to survey the path and flush out danger. Rae put up a fuss when I announced my intention to ride, though she had no right to whatever. Any member of our coda is permitted to become a
scout at the onset of her thirteenth winter, and stay as long as the others will have her. But Rae considered her own judgment sufficient to keep me with the wagons and would not hear otherwise. My sister's temper is never to be trifled with, but this was one of the few times I have seen her in so black a rage. She would have had me forever nannying Baby and laundering everyone's underthings had Reaper Thom not finally succeeded in talking her down. I have been thin with her ever since. Who she thinks she is to make exceptions to our coda's laws I cannot say. Rae herself was fully two months younger than I am now when she first joined the scouts, and she is counted among their best. I intend to be every bit as good and have spent many a sleepless night pondering just how I will achieve this lofty aim.

It thus comes as a surprise when I awake and realize half the night has already passed. The upstairs chamber where we have bedded down with some of the Hollises is dark save for a few rambling embers, and I lie there listening to the breathing of sleepers dreaming quiet dreams. And then I hear something else, a kind of metallic winding, and notice Rae's bed has not been slept in.

I find her seated by a window in the hall, looking out into the clear night. I'm sure she hasn't seen me, but then she says, “Hey there, Sunshine. What's the matter? Not sleepy?”

The windows of shroomhouses seem thin and flimsy but are harder than any glass I have ever encountered. Outside, the clouds have cleared, allowing moonlight to fall bright into the hall. “Is the storm over?”

“Not quite. It's just resting a bit.”

“Are there moon babies out?” I regret speaking as soon as the words leave my mouth. Moon babies are colorful blooms of light found in the vicinity of the Moon on some clear nights, often in the company of angel's stitches and sparrow fires and other similar displays. They make a grand spectacle, and the number of times I have witnessed them could be counted on one hand. It is said they are more commonly seen from New Absalom, but likely that is just another of the superstitions surrounding this place, and I fear by asking I have shown myself the silly girl I am trying so hard to prove I am not.

“Just the plain old Moon,” Rae says.

“Then what are you doing?”

She turns her face to me, smiling. “Thinking about winter. There's a
book of stories I've been meaning to finish. And I think I'll carve a set of chess for Baby.” She sighs happily. “You go on back to bed. Big day tomorrow. I'll be along in a minute.”

Rae is in a fine mood, our quarrels of the past days seemingly forgotten. I am not so quick to relinquish a grudge, but like all my sister's passions, her happiness is catching, and as I crawl beneath my covers, I feel a smile climbing my face.

Not until I am teetering on the edge of sleep do I recall the sound of winding metal that drew me from my bed and picture Rae beside the window, and see the pistol in her hand, and hear the ratcheting as she worked the action over and over and over and over.